June 24th.—We went quickly through Banbury, pretty though the place be. We stayed not even to have a cake. Truth is, we were haunted by our greatest foe, the traction engine fiend, which twice yesterday nearly brought us to grief and my narrative to a close.
The country ’twixt Banbury and the little village of Warmington, which lies in a hollow—and that hollow is a forest of fine trees—is beautiful. The soil in many of the fields a rich rusty red. There is what may well be called a terrible hill to descend before you reach the road that leads to Warmington. Once here, we found ourselves on a spacious green, with ample room for a hundred caravans. The village is primitive in the extreme—primitive and pretty. Are we back in the middle ages, I wonder?
Here is no hotel, no railway, no telegraph, no peep at a daily paper, and hardly stabling for a horse.
“I can only get stabling for one horse,” I said to a dry, hard-faced woman who was staring at me.
I thought she might suggest something.
“Humph!” she replied; “and I ain’t got stabling e’en for one horse. And wot’s more, I ain’t got a ’orse to stable!”
I felt small, and thought myself well off.
The people here talk strangely. Their patois is different from Berkshire, even as the style of their houses is, and the colour of the fields. Wishing yesterday to get a photograph of the old church at Adderbury, I entered an inn.
The round-faced landlord was very polite, but when I asked for a photographer,—
“A wot, sir?” he said.